Air-to-ground (ATG) communications systems, including those disclosed in the listed Related Applications, present certain challenges for providing robust user experiences in all situations. In particular, ATG communications using existing terrestrial cellular networks may present difficulty in maintaining continuous RF connectivity in areas not fully supported by enough cellular base stations or sector coverage. For example, much of the western states, coastal regions, or over-the-water travel paths may not have contiguous or any cellular coverage. Many places have terrestrial coverage gaps as large as 100 miles or more. This problem is amplified with business jet aircraft, as they tend to have their own unique flight paths in contrast to commercial jets which generally have prescribed and/or predictable air lanes that correlate to ground network presence. Hence, a loss of link is highly probable in some areas particularly relying on pre-existing network assets.
This loss of link may be ok where “down time” is in the order of seconds as, a client in session may not detect loss of link for this amount of time and the user device autoconnect feature rapidly reconnects to the next available tower. A more troubling difficulty with a potential loss of link occurs while processing important or secure online information, such as accessing online information through a secure socket layer (SSL) session. Many secure IP transactions monitor IP addresses and will terminate the session if the IP address changes. By connecting, dropping and connecting again, a change in IP address may result. In an SSL sessions, such a change in IP address would require a user to re-enter identification information like a username and password. This is an inconvenience to the user and makes broken IP sessions highly undesirable while in flight.